My Viral Content Buzz Case Study: How to Get Found on the Internet

Last year we announced our new kid: Viral Content Buzz. We’ve been diligently going through (and beyond) the To-Do list since then and even though the project can be considered pretty established now, I still have my wow moments with it.

One of them is a little case study of how VCB is able to revive a pretty dead site.

I have a little website which I don’t have time to focus on. It was started as a hobby and sadly, times got too busy too fast.

The site has a part-time editor (not that the person has a bunch of time for it either) and basically it is maintained as follows:

I try to write at least one article a month for it (I write for a lot of places but I only have 24 hours a day, so nothing personal here!);

The site wasn’t doing well in Google and it was doing pretty average on Twitter and Facebook.

A few weeks ago I submitted my own article to Viral Content Buzz and it worked!

***There’s always that feeling when you are building a tool and you are full of excitement and hopes but then you see it actually working and that’s the best reward you can get…

Anyway, the traffic isn’t crazy so far, but if you see what it used to be, the progress is huge for the half-forgiven (still loved) site:

Here’s the project stats from VCB:

As you can see, it was pretty-well seeded on StumbleUpon and if you look at its StumbleUpon reviews, it got quite a few natural likes there which must have meant it worked!

If you look at traffic sources, StumbleUpon is its largest source now:

(Yes, SU traffic isn’t that great when it comes to user engagement, but it’s still not bad!)

Viral Marketing Generating Machine?

No… Whenever you see someone call their site / service like this, run!

I say, this little case study is perfect illustration of how Viral Content Buzz should work: It just seeds a couple of initial votes and let your content quality do the rest for you! The better content, the more odds you have to get more shares and likes!

Here’s what we are trying to accomplish with ViralContentBuzz:

Use the platform to put your best content in front of influential social media users. It’s tough to be alone and website owners usually are. What works? How to get attention? You can’t just build something and wait when it’s discovered. The Internet is huge – you can’t hope your gem will be found by accident (I mean, there are accidents of course, but come on! that’s a poor marketing model)… Viral Content Buzz is the most “unintrusive” way to “pitch” your content to social media users. Mind that we encourage our users to be selective, so if they share your articles, that must mean you are on the right track!

Use the platform to *test* your content… Not all my articles did well on SU; some of them did better on Twitter than Facebook… Depending on how your content spreads within Viral Content Buzz, you can mildly adapt your efforts. For example:

Or if I saw it’s doing well on Pinterest, I’d go ahead and use that to grow my Pinterest network (liking, thanking, following those who support my staff)…

ViralContentBuzz is not an automated machine… Nor it is supposed to *fake* it that your pages enjoy some social media love. It’s the way to get discovered and move forward accordingly (if you deserve it). It’s meant to show you the direction.

Reader Interactions

Comments

Very cool case study showing how a site with virtually no traffic picked up after using VCB.

I have experienced something similar when submitting one of my old neglected sites.

More importantly I have been using VCB to help promote all content marketing efforts we do on behalf of clients and guess what? That’s also working extremely well.

But like you pointed out it only works as well as the content is. Since users only share based on the merits of the content alone there is sort of a “content Darwinism” type of effect where content only gets shared if it’s worthy of being shared.

So the system is fair and works great if users are willing to do the work of creating awesome content that people will want to share.

I have been using Viral Content Buzz and I do notice that my content is getting shared. I think it is a great tool for traffic. I haven’t been consistent in using it as much as I should but I am going to get back on it because when I do use it I see that I get results. Thank you for sharing these statistics with us!

I understand that Viral Content Buzz is not an automated application. I just want to clarify are contents posted here go for quality check before approved (I guess it should be), and if so, what are the parameters.

Hi Ann Smarty,
Really an awesome case study you shared with us. I was really interested to know, and i am now here! I never used Viral Content Buzz before but i will try.
Thanks fro sharing. Bookmarked!

Hey Ann! Yeah I was using Viral Content Buzz at the end of last year and it was a really cool program because of the strict approvals with content and the real person shares, as opposed to bots sharing content. I see you got some great results. I figured I’d hop back on VCB a little more to get back in to it with the social side of things. Great article and thanks for sharing! -Jason

Sorry for bumping this years old post, but after readying the case study, I can’t stop myself. I am so influenced that I went to VCB site, and watched the Youtube video to understand how it works. I must say; Nice logic!

Share others content to get credits, and then use the same credit to promote your own content. Just wanted to say thanks. keep up the great work.

I’m sure that creating viral content is not just luck. You could be lucky to find the necessary ingredients. Fortunately, these elements are not secrets. Jonah Berger’s book already revealed them, so creating something remarkable is rather science than luck.

I think the trickiest part is promotion, this is where most of the people fail.

We created a guide,which helps content creators to repeatedly create viral content. Hopefully more of them will learn how to spread like a virus in social media. 🙂

Looks like an awesome tool for social media that I’m planning to use in the near future. Hopefully it can help get more loyal customers/followers and not just traffic. Any plans on adding Linkedin shares? It will benefit B2B

[…] I created and launched a ViralContentBuzz Udemy course where I collected all our video guides and tutorials in one place (steal this idea!) It’s still a work in project but that’s a solid start if you are looking for benefiting from our platform (my own personal case study can be found here) […]

[…] Good Content Provides Increasing Traffic Over Time: Nicholas Tart of Income Diary presented an interesting look into his own use of StumbleUpon. He said that he had submitted a single, high quality piece of content that was “content StumbleUpon users like”, and measured the results. On that single piece of content, he got an astonishing 158,000 Stumbles over time. Most of this started to happen five months after it was initially submitted, which teaches an important lesson: timing is different for SU campaigns. Where with other social networks you would hope to see a quick increase in shares, and possible viral status once in a blue moon, SU is a more patient form of marketing. It has to be planted and allowed to grow. Be sure to check out Tart’s article for some interesting advice on improving your results. Here’s also a very actionable article on getting traffic from StumbleUpon (supported by my own case study). […]